


Pillars of Salt and Sand

by AdorableDoom



Series: Fairytales [2]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Character Death, Gen, Past Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-04
Updated: 2016-08-04
Packaged: 2018-07-29 06:17:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7673278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdorableDoom/pseuds/AdorableDoom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything he's ever done, the good, the bad, and the unthinkable has been for her. Sequel to Fairytales.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pillars of Salt and Sand

**Author's Note:**

> Contains potential spoilers for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. A sequel to Fairytales. Why am I so emo about Jyn's parents? I dunno man.

       Galen is the first person to hold Jyn. He'd delivered her in the ruins of a clothing shop where they had taken shelter when the separatists had started bombing the city. The government had refused to kneel and now their people were paying the price. If Dooku couldn't have the planet, no one could. Aleta had shouted instructions at him between cries of pain and deep shuddering breaths.  
       She had clutched at him like he was the only thing holding their shattering world together. Jyn was born just as the bombing had come to an end. Galen caught her. There was a beat of silence filled by the ragged beating of his heart against his ribs and then a cry. The most beautiful sound he had ever heard.  
        Jyn was small, so small, smaller than anything had any right to be but furious, tiny purple hands balled into fists as she wailed into the night. She looked up at him with wide, unfocused blue eyes that would later turn the color of Galen's own and Galen wondered what she saw. "Is she okay?" Aleta had wept, dark hair plastered to her face and breathing ragged. "She's perfect," he breathed, barely aware of the tears pouring down his own face. The city is burning around them and the galaxy is being torn apart but in that moment, none of it matters.  
         All that mattered was her. Jyn would not grow up afraid in a galaxy hellbent on destroying itself. She was going to be safe and happy. He would do everything in his power to make that happen. Aleta looked at him and he looked at her, locking their fingers together with his free hand, both of them smiling joyfully as the city burned around them.

       Jyn is six weeks old when deliverance comes at last. Not in the form of the Republic or even the Jedi but the glorious Empire. Palpatine, Emperor Palpatine ends the Clone Wars and brings peace and order to the galaxy at last. "You're going to be safe now," Galen promised Jyn as she slept in his arms that night. He and Aleta had made their way to the black sanded beach where they'd met so long ago as university students.  
      That'd set up a small camp with the supplies the clone troopers had given them. Aleta had fallen asleep the minute they'd finished and Galen had taken Jyn and sat on the beach. The darkened sky above them was lit up not by bombs but by fireworks. The galaxy was battered and in ruins but they would rebuild. They would be better this time. No more corruption. No more war. There would be peace and order. The galaxy would be safe. Jyn would be safe.

      Slowly but surely their world rises from the ashes. Aleta opens her own practice. Many of her patients lost everything in the war and most times she doesn't charge at all. Sometimes she comes home with an armload of fruits and vegetables or assorted meats or baked goods her patients insisted she take as payment so they ate well. Galen continued his work and research from home usually with Jyn riding atop his shoulders.  
      She's playing at his feet when Galen finally gets perfects the project he'd been working on since before the war. A power source that could produce enough energy to sustain an entire planet using crystals rather than plasma. He'd nearly blown up their small house (twice) but he had finally done it! Galen leapt out of his chair with a cry of joy and swept Jyn up off the ground as spun her around as he laughed. "We did it! We did it!" Galen cheered.  
     With this vast power there would be no more need for conflict! No more war! No more fear and devastation! Jyn shirked with laughter, too young to fully understand what her father had done for the galaxy, for her, but he was happy and that was enough. They were still laughing and dancing around the brightly glowing lab when Aleta walked in the door with a basket overflowing with sweet purple roots. The moment it had been safely set aside, Galen seized her too and the three spun around the lab for the longest time, laughing with joy.  
     It's a moment he would give anything to have back.  
  
       Less than a month after he'd written and presented his findings at the university, the Empire takes notice. One afternoon Aleta answers a knock at the door and finds Vice Admiral Rancit and famed engineer Bevel Lemelisk himself standing in the garden. "The Emperor has been following your work with great interest Dr. Erso," Rancit said, "and we'd like your help on a special project." Lemelisk, a short nervous man who seemed to jump a foot in the air at the slightest sound said nothing at all. It's the beginning of the end.  
        More than once over the years, after he'd lost his wife and child Galen would think back to that moment in their small sitting room and two primly dressed officers sitting on their sofa. He would think of Aleta sitting beside him, her hand clutching his so tight her knuckles had turned white. He would think of Jyn playing with the Stormtrooper doll he'd made her on the floor. And he would wonder what would have happened if he had said no.

      The difference between him and Aleta was that when the war had ended, Galen had left the battlefield but Aleta hadn't. It wasn't who she was. Aleta who had run into firefights to help complete strangers. Aleta who was a better shot than most Imperial officers he'd met. That courage, that strength was why he had fallen in love with her.  
     Maybe it was why she'd seen the Empire for what it truly was.  
     And why Galen hadn't seen it until it was too late.  
     He is favored by the Emperor himself. He and his family will want for nothing. He had a position, prestige many would give anything to have. Galen who vividly remembers the long, hungry and fear filled days of the destruction of the Clone Wars is grateful Jyn nor any other child will ever have to know what that was like thanks to the work he and the Empire are doing. Truly he is.  
       Yet there is always something, something he can't quite place nor truly name that makes his new found status never quite sit right with him. Galen becomes an expert at hiding that discomfort, telling himself that with time he'll become more at ease. At times, he almost convinces himself with that. Aleta doesn't. It isn't long before the whispers begin.  
   "Radical."  
    "Disloyal."  
    "They're using you!" Aleta screamed at him. It seemed the only time they ever spoke anymore was to argue. They were down in his lab, taking care not to argue in front of their daughter if they could avoid it. This was the last conversation they would ever have. "I'm trying to help people! Do you remember what it was like during the wars? Billions of people died! I'm making sure that never happens again!" Aleta stared up at him in what he had thought at the time was disappointment but would later come to recognize as desperation.  
      "The Empire is killing people Galen!" Galen shook his head in denial. He wasn't blind. He knew what went on in their city when people spoke out against the Empire but it was for the greater good he knew. The Empire had to keep people safe and sometimes that meant making some ugly choices.  
     At least that was what he tried to tell himself.  
     Aleta reached out and seized both of his hands in hers, clutching at him. "Galen, please," she said simply. For years he'd clung to that image of her. Beautiful, defiant Aleta who so brave and so strong. Galen pulled his hands free from her grasp and turned away from her and back to his work.  
    He made his choice.  
    And she made hers.  
    Galen awoke the next morning alone. He didn't think anything of it, Aleta often left early to open the med center. It was only when he went to wake Jyn for school and found her bed empty that he knew what had happened. He searched the city for hours, hoping and praying he could find them and bring them home before anyone else realized they were gone and contacted the authorities. Aleta had made spoken out too much for her leaving to be considered a simple marital dispute.  
      She would be suspected of being disloyal or worse for treason against the Empire. Galen had been able to shield her from such accusations before with his position but now he wouldn't be able to protect her. Galen searched from one end of the city to the other to no end. When he was finally forced to return home, the city's stormtrooper guard and their commander were waiting for him. "Don't worry Dr. Erso," the commander assured him in a voice that chilled him to the bone rather than offered reassurance, "we'll find your wife." Privately, Galen prays that they don't.

     At first, he thinks Aleta and Jyn will come back, that perhaps she just needed some time to work through things. And then the days turn into months. Then the months become years. Galen stays in their house although his research had expanded exponentially. Many of his colleagues had urged him to leave the planet, that his work would be better suited being moved to Coruscant or even to one of the Emperor's private research facilities. Yet he couldn't leave.  
     He had to be there when his wife and daughter returned home. If he left, how would they find him? Galen didn't share these thoughts when anyone. At first it was because he didn't want their pity but later it was there wasn't anyone he trusted to share them with. As the years past, the difference between those who were favored by the Empire and those who weren't became more and more glaring.  
     There had been a time when the presence of the black clad officers and stormtroopers moving through the streets had comforted him. Now he found himself skirting away and refusing to meet their gaze. Eventually, he stops going to Imperial functions all together.     He's eccentric enough that no one thinks much of it. In truth, he can't stand them anymore.  
The corruption. The fear mongering. He hates what they've become.  
     What he's become.  
     He searches for his daughter in the face of every person her age that he passes on the rare occasions he goes out at all. Is she safe? Does she hate him? He wouldn't blame her if she did. She'd be fifteen years old and it seemed an impossible age for her to be.  
The city's commander comes to give him the news herself. She's the third in as many years.   They found Aleta on Ryloth. Galen's too terrified she's been arrested, shipped off to Keseel or Gods forbid some Imperial prison to be relieved. The truth is worse than he could've possibly imagined.

     Aleta had been put into stasis not long after her body had been discovered among the dead. Nothing could've prepared Galen for the sight of her. Her face was more lined than it had been the last time he saw her, the dark hair their daughter had inherited was shot through with grey. She was still the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. He'd told her that the first time they met and she'd laughed.  
     He'd never get to hear her laugh again. Galen reached out and touched her cheek. It was cold. She was cold. There was so much he wanted to say to her and it all died on his tongue. Instead he said the only thing he could. "I'm so sorry." It was useless, pointless and too little too late but he needs to say anyway. Even if she can't hear it now.  
      An industrial accident, they kept saying, a tragic mining explosion. It's a lie, a poor one at that and Galen knows it. Officers keep dropping by to offer false condolences and ask questions veiled as concern.  
    Did your wife know anyone on Ryloth?  
    Was she visiting someone?  
    Friends?  
    Former colleagues?  
    Galen doesn't know the answers and he wouldn't give them if he did. "What about my daughter?" he keeps demanding. "Where is my daughter!" Aleta would've never left Jyn. Not ever, not for anything. That meant she had been on Ryloth. They don't have answers for him or if they do they don't share them.  
    Galen doesn't give a damn about the Empire or the galaxy. To hell with them both. He's going to find his daughter. He's going to bring her home. He couldn't save his wife, had failed her in the worst way but he's not going to fail Jyn.  
Not again.

     It takes the Empire a few years to find him but they do. The search for his daughter had gone nowhere. She would be an adult now, the age Galen and Aleta had been when they married. The peace and order presented by the Empire is an illusion, the worst kind of lie. The galaxy is a fearful chaotic mess trapped under the thumb of a tyrant.  
     What was she like, Galen often wondered. Is she like her mother? Or was she like him? He hoped it was the former. Did she ever think of him the way he often thought of her?  
Sometimes, more often than he had liked to admit, especially when things seemed particularly hopeless, Galen wondered if his search was pointless. He'd seen more than once what truly happened to those who dared speak out against the Empire. Beings lined up and shot. Homes and business burned to the ground. Was she even alive?  
      Had she been one of the nameless, countless beings who had been crushed by the Empire? Galen always managed to push the thoughts away. Jyn was alive, he was certain. She was a fighter, just like her mother. She was alive and he was going to find her.  
Galen is in the Outer Rim when he heard rumors about a rebel base on Dantooine. It's the best lead he'd gotten in awhile. A long shot yes but it's the only one he's got. It's easy enough to trade work for a ride on a freighter delivering technical parts (and probably spice) to a nearby moon. Galen is good at fixing things.  
    Maybe it's the only thing he'd ever been good at.  
    The ship had barely dropped out of hyperspace when it's intercepted by the Empire. Galen stays in his quarters. There's nowhere to run, he knows that. They've got him. It isn't IBS who steps through the doorway.  
     No, Galen isn't that lucky. It's something so much worse. Orson Krennic, a director of Advanced Weapons Research looks utterly out of place in his spotless and impeccable white uniform standing in the dirty, narrow room. Orson Krennic, brilliant and blood thirsty. He was alone which surprised Galen as most high ranking officers rarely went anywhere without a trooper escort but then again if the rumors of the violence the director was capable of dealing out himself were true perhaps he didn't need them. Krennic looked down at Galen and smiled in such a way that on anyone else would've been charming but on him it cut like a knife.  
     "Dr. Erso, you're not an easy man to find," he said, not with one of the posh core accents Galen had been expecting but rather one you'd find on one of the lesser Outer Rim territories. "Are you going to kill me?" The thought doesn't bother him as much as it probably should. Krennic actually laughed at that. "If I wanted you dead I assure you doctor you would be," he said simply as if they were merely discussing the weather.  
     "No, you're a brilliant man Dr. Erso, an asset to the Empire. You're going to come with me and continue your work." Galen would have preferred it if Krennic had just shot him. "Do I have a choice?" In surprisingly quick gesture, Krennic reached out and seized Galen by the upper arm in an iron grip and pulled the other man easily to his feet. "No doctor, you do not."  
      It's the director himself who leads Galen through the corridors littered with the bodies of the crew with his silent black armored Deathtroopers following in their wake. Galen wondered if Krennic had killed them himself or if he had ordered the troopers to do it for him. And if when the time came because he knows that it will soon enough, which of them would be the one who killed him.

  
    Aleta had tried to tell him the Empire wasn't using his work for the good of galaxy but Galen had refused to hear her. The truth of it is so much more horrifying than he could've imagined. As they had begun their approach to Scarif, a secluded, tropical planet where a massive military instillation had been built a decade earlier, Krennic had brought Galen from his cell to the bridge to "take in the view." Galen had stood beside the ramrod straight director in utter confusion until a small moon had come into view. Expect it hadn't been a moon.  
     "Beautiful, isn't it?" Krennic said conversationally as Galen looked on in horror. It was massive. Nothing like it had ever existed before. It shouldn't exist. "Made possible in no small part thanks to your work doctor," Krennic said with smile.  
     Galen had done this. His work had brought this on the galaxy. A battle station the size of planet. Gods what had he done? And how many countless billions of beings would pay for his sins?  
      Krennic chuckled in amusement at the horror on Galen's suddenly colorless face before nodding to two of his troopers who promptly drug Galen back to cell without a word. "We're going to do great things you and I!" Krennic called after him. As soon as the door whooshed shut behind them, Galen sank to the floor and wept.  
      Galen isn't sure how long he sat there, lost in sea of guilt and misery before the troopers returned and hauled him to his feet. It barely registers that they didn't land on the surface of the planet but rather on the battle station itself. The battle station he had, however inadvertently, helped to create. Krennic walked beside him as if he's giving a tour, explaining this and and that as if they were old friends. Galen only takes in about half of what he's saying but what cuts through the guilt and the utter sense of hopelessly is horrific.  
     A moon sized deep space mobile battle station manned with thousands upon thousands of soldiers. It's monstrous. Galen had lived through the Clone Wars. Billions dead and the galaxy in ruins. He had thought, naively, that nothing could be worse than that.  
      He was wrong, there was something far, far worse and Galen was walking through it's corridors. Worse still, he had helped create it. This awful thing wouldn't exist without him. How was he supposed to live with that?

      Director Krennic's office was just as ugly and astute as all Imperial architecture with a view of the glittering blue and green world of Scarif that would've been beautiful under normal circumstances. He waved his troopers away, saying simply "I'm perfectly capable of shooting him myself." Galen was almost tempted to call his bluff, perhaps he would've even done so had Krennic not reached into his pocket and retrieved a small holo which he extended towards Galen and activated. It's her. He knows it's her.  
     Galen had worried that if (when) he found Jyn he wouldn't be able to recognize her because it had been so long. The thought seemed utterly ridiculous now. Of course he would know her regardless of how many years had passed. She was his daughter and he would know her anywhere. "Forgery of Imperial documents, aggravated assault, resisting arrest and that's just what we know about. It's impressive really," Krennic said. It's an age beforeGalen can tear his eyes away his daughter's face to meet the director's cold gaze evenly. "Any one of those crimes is punishable by a considerably lengthy prison sentence or worse," Krennic explained. "And we have reason to believe she's joined the so called Rebel Alliance. That's an automatic execution after interrogation." Had Galen been a stronger man, braver he would've strangled the man in front of him. They're nearly the same height, in a fair fight Galen maybe could've beaten him. But Galen isn't a fighter.  
       He's just a father and a desperate one at that. "What do you want from me?" he asked heavily, defeat settling over him like a heavy coat. Krennic deactivated the holo and smiled. "Lemelisk created a brilliant design but it's flawed. I want you to fix his mistakes. You help me," Krennic said gesturing to himself and then Galen, "and I'll help you. When we do apprehend your daughter and I promise you we will, I'll have her brought here. Unharmed of course." Then you'll kill me, Galen thought, and Jyn too.  
       Galen had been Imperial for nearly two decades, he knew how things worked. As soon Krennic had gotten what he wanted they were both as good as dead. No Galen isn't a fighter but he isn't a fool either. His work had helped build this awful thing and his work could make sure it never hurt anyone. He couldn't undo what he'd done but he could make it right.  
"Do we have a deal?" Krennic finally prompted when Galen had yet to speak. Galen met Krennic's gaze evenly. There's nothing he wouldn't do for his daughter. Even this.  
    "Yes."

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> As of right now Jyn's mother's name is unknown so I made one up. Bevel Lemelisk was the engineer of the Death Star in the old EU. Title comes from Coldplay's song Viva la Vida.


End file.
